UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Transnational feminism and discoursing about gendered practices of globalization appear to be the most widespread feminist theoretical frameworks in women’s studies departments across North America. To the student of Eastern Europe, however, this is a closed scholarship, limited only to histories and geographies that circumvent Eastern Europe, as if communism did not fall there seventeen years ago, as if women from Eastern Europe do not have an existence or a voice. I am not talking about the absence of a voice in general, since rigorous studies about Eastern European women’s lives do exist in some departments of anthropology, sociology, history, political science, and Slavic studies. I am talking about those very institutionalized outlets (women’s studies departments) that should have embraced and encouraged the expression of Eastern European women’s issues and narratives through transnational feminism, after more than fifty years of confinement behind the Iron Curtain.1